“There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” - Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Why do I make things?
It actually has very little to do with the finished outcome as much as it does with the process that I go through in creating the piece. This is a conversation I’ve been having with quite a few people recently - both artists and recipients alike.
Art, for someone who walks into a space and sees a piece, is just that. What they see on a wall, or in the middle of a room, or against another structure. Their take-away is how that piece in THAT form affected them at the time they saw it. And everything feeds into that - the geography of it, the lighting, the display, and the mind space they are in; what they’ve just been through or are going through at the time. So the appraisals and critiques that come in about said piece is reflected from that perspective.
For any artist, though, the final form is just the last swirl of the art itself. The proverbial frosting. The outcome. For us, the art was in making it - what we went through, what boundaries we pushed or stayed within, what we were thinking of, what inspired us to make it, and what pushed the buttons.
I don’t make for the accolades (though those are great too!) I make because that’s all I know how to do. I make because I have to. It’s how I talk. It’s how I communicate. And I suppose that will be the forever dichotomy of trying to make a living from art… we never did it for the money. We did it to breathe.
In today’s world where reaching out to people across the globe has become so much easier because of social media, do artists create for the art they want to make, or for the content they’re trying to generate for their digital presence? The art that can fit into a finely tuned, beautifully edited 30-45 second video. If I spent my time trying to satisfy that audience promoting a fleeting attention span of content consumption, then when do I create my art? Where do I get to express what I’m going through and get it out of my system so it doesn’t consume me from the inside out? Do we only need art for aesthetic’s sake, as a backdrop for a good picture, or is it to communicate through a different language? Is it an accessory alone, or something that will tell the world decades from now what this age was about - what it looked like and felt like and meant?
As an artist who lives off my art, I go through many sets of thoughts and emotions and frustrations on a daily - especially in regards to living off my art. For the last 20 years, I have consciously chosen to be an independent creative professional, irrespective of the challenges it comes with in terms of finding a market for my work, or clients who are willing to give me the creative freedom to do what I do. The constant haggling of prices to put against the pieces I create, resorting the value of the piece solely to a number and not counting what goes in to the actual creation is a headache I could do without. To resort to comparing the value of me against how much money I can make by expressing myself the only way I know how, is a heartache I could do without.
The world is a competitive place. Everybody is trying to one-up themselves against each other. The newest trend. The most number of followers. The viral click-through.
But that’s not what will last at the end of the day.
It will be the mark we chose to make, the one that captured the essence of the human spirit over and above the noise and chaos we created.
It’ll be the quiet pieces that tells the true story of what happened here.